This paper discusses Pacific Rim as a film deeply concerned with birth, in particular the horror of birth, and the process by which birth is assimilated. The film may then be seen as part of an unbroken commentary on nuclear
weapons insofar as it is our technological, capitalistic, and nuclear capability that allows
us to close the “breach” and…[Read more]

Just prior to 9/11 the film Code Unknown: An Incomplete Tale of Different Journeys (2000) was released: a series of successive tableaux depicting the random and generally ‘aggressive’ encounters among strangers, neighbours, family members, lovers etc. displays a network of challenging interdependence amongst Parisians. The film was variously cri…[Read more]

The vernacular online videos produced by the Arab revolutions constitute an unprecedented (though not unproblematic) historical resource for understanding the subjective experience of the ordinary people who find themselves on the front line of revolutionary struggle. But they also effect a sea-change in the way in which we view and understand…[Read more]

A close reading of a video collaboration by two citizen journalists, one from Libya, the other from the US, as a form of audiovisual solidarity. This article draws in particular on concepts developed by Laura Marks and Hito Steyerl.

When Jackie Chan was introduced to Japanese audiences in the early 1980s, he was promoted as the answer to the void that popular martial arts star Bruce Lee had left upon his death in 1975. The mischievous ‘monkey’ to Lee’s more ferocious ‘dragon’, Chan’s films were aggressively marketed to an audience of male martial arts fans; yet this…[Read more]

Recent years have witnessed the growth of a body of literature concerned with what Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu has termed “Chinese cinemas,”1 sparked by the increased international visibility of films from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and characterized by an emerging interest in the ways that such works negotiate both “the triumphantly…[Read more]

A Bakhtinian Analysis of Language and Multiculturalism in Iwai Shunyi’s Swallowtail Butterfly

Scholarship on representations of East Asian women has honed on the ubiquity of a ‘geisha’ stereotype in Asian-themed Hollywood films: women who willingly acquiesce to the prerogatives of Western men and, in so doing, symbolically affirm the subordination of East Asian political autonomy to a paternalistic United States. Within this context, the…[Read more]

This paper examines two documentary essays focusing on landmark architecture in the transnational Øresund region comprising Copenhagen and Malmö. I argue that the motif of construction and deconstruction is congruous to our understanding of the ways identities are negotiated vis-à-vis spatial experience. In the lms, the multiple trajectories of…[Read more]

Recent opera repertoire has seen a wide variety of styles in opera composition. Marco Polo represents a rather unique corner of this wide variety. Tan Dun explores a capacious array of influences in this work. Starting from his own roots, Chinese traditional music, he explores European art tradition to some extent. Tan Dun also touches the styles…[Read more]

Death doom metal or death/doom emerges as a distinct style in early 1990s mostly focused in northern England. This style or, tentatively, sub-genre of doom may be argued to be a leisure space for participants in this culture. Dark leisure theory attempts to describe non-mainstream leisure activity, and even though it started in criminological and…[Read more]

In the post-modern era, the domination of repetition in aesthetics allows for deeper meaning to be conveyed with limited musical material. The repetition, within Sigmund Freud’s interpretation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), becomes a ‘repetition-compulsion’ that resonates beyond the aural recurrences. Obsession inherent in depre…[Read more]

Doom (metal) has been seen as the ‘slower’ -in more than one sense- sibling in metal music in general. The slowness can be argued to be true for some cases within doom and this slowness, prominently in musical terms but alongside other angles, can be the defining factor of a portion of doom music. For example, while funeral doom may be argued to…[Read more]

Doom metal music and culture have been under the influence of 1970s hippie ideologies from the beginning with the music of Black Sabbath. Tony Iommi in an interview from 2011 suggests that Black Sabbath has been using the label ‘doom’ since its early days. While during early stages of doom music, this influence or interaction took both tra…[Read more]

Melancholy, death, and the darker thought spectrum should not be considered separate from black metal at any point through its history. In contrast however, depressive suicidal black metal (DSBM) took these themes further in terms of their crudity, and more importantly it fixated on the ideas of death and suicide. The birth pangs of this style are…[Read more]

Death plays an important role in human life, and there have been many theories about how this inevitability affects human thought, and social life. According to anthropological studies, death and death-related phenomena, including rituals, music, the meaning of death, are based on the originating cultures. This makes depressive suicidal black…[Read more]

Vocal accent in musical performance may carry more information than what is apparent at a first look. This idea becomes more significant in a popular music realm, where globalization is pronounced, thus making the dichotomy of individuality and belonging desires obscured compared to a realm where locality dominates the form of expression. This…[Read more]

After the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, Hong Kong music in general lingered in the middle of influences from the English heritage, Mainland China, and local traditions. This is observed best in popular music made, and performed in Hong Kong’s local scenes. As a result of globalisation of 1990s and 2000s, Hong Kong’s local popular mus…[Read more]

Death/doom metal music, a style of extreme metal, emerged around the beginning of 1990s with a genius loci in West Yorkshire. While this style dispersed around the globe during this decade and later decades, the pioneers of this style -namely Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride, and Anathema- quickly moved on from the style which they are credited to…[Read more]

After the extreme turn of late 1980s and early 1990s of metal music, three northern England-based bands –My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost from Bradford, and Anathema from Liverpool, commonly referred to as ‘the Peaceville Three’ because of their record label based is Dewsbury, West Yorkshire- went on to pioneer the musical style which came to be…[Read more]